All Work Is Cultural Work
Diasporic Haitian Women, Paid Labor, and Cultural Citizenship

Nikita Carney (Author)

9781978828308

Paperback / softback, published 9 December 2025

174 pages, 1 table
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.254 kg

"A brilliant cultural analysis and a meticulous ethnography that reshapes our understanding of migration, labor, and belonging. In this nuanced transnational study, Carney illuminates how diasporic Haitian women in Boston, Montreal, and Paris navigate the intersections of race, gender, class, and paid labor to forge cultural citizenship across borders. This book offers a pathbreaking contribution to sociology and the broader social sciences by challenging conventional paradigms of migration and citizenship, revealing how work itself becomes a profound act of cultural production and resistance. This is essential reading for scholars of migration, culture, labor studies, gender, and race." - Victor M. Rios, author of Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys

"We truly need more intersectional work on immigrant women's experiences in the United States, and in All Work is Cultural Work, Nikita Carney does a fantastic job of laying out arguments about cultural citizenship, national belonging, and culture work, and she provides such an important contribution to academic literature by showing how these women are active agents." - Celeste Vaughan Curington, author of Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal (Rutgers University Press)

What does it mean to belong in a nation? All Work Is Cultural Work examines how Haitian women living in diaspora find and create status through their work outside the home. Nikita Carney draws on ethnographic data gathered over several years in Boston, Montreal, and Paris with women who left Haiti in search of other things: safety, financial security, and opportunity. Ranging from administrative assistants to dancers to preschool teachers, the women in this study share their rich experiences, teaching us how they found a place in their new host nations through paid labor. Focusing on small, daily interactions in the workplace, these women's narratives highlight the ways in which often invisible daily cultural practices build and re-build both the nation and the home. Taking into account the overlapping and interlocking systems of oppression her participants face both nationally and globally, Carney uses an intersectional analysis to illuminate how the workplace serves as a central site in which Haitian women become raced, gendered, and classed within the nation. Ultimately, the lives and experiences of these women point to one conclusion: culture is indivisible from labor and labor from culture, with paid labor providing a vital method for national culture to be created and recreated each and every day.

Introduction 1
1 Haiti in a Global Context 22
2 Social Ties and Complex Inclusion in the Nation 34
3 Gendered Race and Ethnicity Across Borders 56
4 Gender Roles and Work, In and Out of the Home 75
5 Gendered Work and Work as Independence
90
6 All Work Is Cultural Work 105
Conclusion 113
Afterword 118
Appendix A Methodological Appendix 121
Appendix B Overview of Interview Participants 125
Acknowledgments
135
Notes 137
References 151
Index 000